The Fires of Orc
Chapter 19: By Whatever Means

Rationality will not save us.

Robert McNamara

To do anything good, anything worth remembering, you might have to engage in a measure of evil, or at least crowd right up next to it. Morality is a bubble. If you live in it for too long you breathe up all the oxygen in your little bubble and you must burst out or suffocate. You have to crash through the safe confines of moral rectitude and dabble in the debased to accomplish a thing of great merit. And when it’s all said and done, acts are only evil if they have no redeeming purpose. Evil redeemed by a higher good is not evil at all; it’s just collateral damage. That’s what I told myself and how I justified the dark, hidden, unsavory goings on that generated the information I wielded in the performance of my craft.

Among my coterie of web hooligans Theowulf was my most secret operative, he of the especially flexible morality and sinister imagination, an agent capable of adapting to skullduggery of whatever nefarious type. I knew little about his real life, not even his real name. I knew he was an NYU dropout, an off-the-grid spook and a malevolent genius. Several times I thought of asking The Soldier to replace out Theowulf’s real identity but I always opted not to. I didn’t really want to know any more about him than necessary. I didn’t need to know and not knowing is almost essential to plausible deniability. On top of that, Theowulf liked his mystique. It was all comic book silliness but there’s no harm in indulging a crackpot’s vanity.

Silly or not, Theowulf had a flair for the dastardly. Turned to the right purposes his uncanny mastery of the Web and its weavings made him a force unmatched by any dozen ordinary hackers. Turned to the wrong purposes, that same mastery made him a threat to international security, civil order, and the very basis of twenty-first century society. I kept him as far from me as possible, but on a short leash all the same. He was my own personal berserker. I paid him well and held his fury in check, knowing I might need his special brand of mayhem eventually.

And in that October it came to pass that mayhem was the order of the day. With six weeks remaining before the election, the polls still had us in the lead in all important regions but our margin was slipping in one critical area. While we were holding steady in the Northeast, West Coast and Great Lakes regions, trouble loomed in Texas.

Long a bastion of Christian conservatism, the Lone Star State had been a hostile territory for Bradley going back to his 2024 campaign. Boston is a most un-Texan place. Bay Staters had been steering clear of Texas since 1963 and Bradley was no exception. A pro-choice, anti-gun, big-government Democrat, he stood no chance in Texas in a race for the Lubbock School Board, much less a presidential campaign. But as an incumbent from a major party, he appealed well enough to the atypical Texan, the Austin intellectual type. From such New Texicans he could count on probably twenty-five percent of the state’s popular votes.

In the other camp, Smith, despite his conservative bona fides, wasn’t terribly well liked in Texas either. For one thing, he was from Pennsylvania. To Texans he might as well have been from Barcelona. For another thing, he was on the record as favoring an immigration policy that would allow children of undocumented immigrants to obtain citizenship if they completed high school in the U.S. For both his northerliness and his sensitivity to brown people, Smith was anathema to the Big Hat establishment in conservative Texas strongholds.

But that September Smith installed a new plank in his platform to shore up his standing in the state. Through his “Work Your Way Home” plan, the federal government would grant funds to state penal systems that required inmates to defray the cost of their imprisonment through contract work for private sector sponsors. What it meant, in short, was that Washington would grant money to state prisons that partnered with the industrial sector to provide free convict labor. The claim was that inmates would gain valuable experience, learn skills relevant to the modern marketplace, and earn their way to earlier release dates through in-custody achievement. In truth it just meant cheap labor for Big Capital and a federal hand-out to the prison industrial complex. In Texas, the state with the largest prison population in the country, the plan appealed to a frontier sense of justice and a powerful economic lobby representing the various corrections authorities.

Smith’s remarks on the plan were unsettling, but brilliant, perfectly pitched at Texan conservatives.

“I don’t believe there is any such thing as an inherently criminal class,” he said, “but I do believe there are ways in which our current approach to crime and punishment actually reinforces a life of crime for far too many of our citizens. There have always been and will always be a certain number of bad apples in our orchard but there’s no reason to let that few spoil the whole bunch. For people who stray from the path and lack the skills to get back on it my plan will provide a route to self-sufficiency on the outside and will make sure they pay the cost of their deserved punishment on the inside. There should be no motivation for lay-abouts and scofflaws to say, ‘To heck with work. I’ll just steal and if I get caught I’ll go to prison and the government can pay to feed me while I kick back in a cell.’”

It wasn’t really a plan at all. It was the promise of a handout from Washington to the states, free money to those states willing to make their prison systems into sweatshops. It was a preposterous idea, one Smith probably couldn’t deliver on even if he won. But during campaign season, talking tough on criminals is just good common sense.

From the moment he began talking about putting convicts to work as virtual slaves Smith got the bounce he had hoped for in Texas. We entered the month with Markus and Smith in a virtual dead-heat in the state, each at about thirty-five percent to Bradley’s twenty-five, with five percent undecided. In the wake of “Work Your Way Home,” Smith edged up three points statewide and in Dallas-Fort Worth, a metropolitan area critical to our strategy, the news was even worse. An overnight poll had Smith at forty-two percent, Markus at twenty-nine and Bradley at twenty-six, with only three percent left over. In Houston, he was leading us forty to thirty-one. Things looked bleak.

Something had to be done. I had no idea what, but then Theowulf called – berserker to the rescue.

“What’s in all those books, Old Timer?”

“Stories. You know that.”

“Are they any good?” he asks.

“They are indeed. They’re among the best stories of more than a hundred years of English, some with roots in story-telling going all the way back to the birth of civilization.”

“Do you know all the stories from the old world?”

“I certainly don’t know them all. I know the ones that matter most.”

“You know,” he says, “I would have thought someone who knows as much as you would be more than a teacher. I’d think with all you know you could rise pretty high in the world.”

“Yes, well, the higher the monkey climbs, the more he exposes.”

“You mean the more you see his ass?”

“Figuratively, yes.”

“So what do you have to hide?” he asks.

It has been a very long time since anyone asked me that. I could answer him, but I’m not sure I could make him understand.

What has a man to hide if what’s done is done? One should hide one’s intentions in advance of his actions, yes. But after the deed is a matter of history, what is left to hide? There’s only guilt and accountability on the other side of action and they don’t amount to much. A man does what he does and as he plans, he hides his motives. To then hide in the aftermath from one’s own executed plan, that just compounds duplicity with cowardice and it makes life a twisting knot of lies and mixed accounts, stressful and ultimately unsustainable. Why not come clean and save oneself the stress?

Besides, can a man ever really escape his own doings? Once it’s done a thing is forever. One can hide from it but that doesn’t undo what’s already done. You are the product of every action you commit and every inaction as well, those things you did but should not have done and the more numerous things you should have done but lacked the will to do. Even in hiding you’re a coward to yourself. Your malfeasance and avoidance, your shortcuts taken and duties stepped timidly over, they make you. You become a living, breathing lie.

“Nothing,” I say.

“Nothing what?”

“I have nothing to hide,” I claim. “I’m just too old to think about climbing ladders.”

“I hear you,” he says. “No ladder around here goes any higher than an orange tree anyway.”

Theowulf asked to talk on a back line that he routed through an international circuit, buried beneath back chatter, free from any invasion by man or machine. Everything with him was trench coats and shadows. I found it comical under normal circumstances but something told me these were not normal circumstances.

He said, “I’ve got something you’re going to want to take upstairs. It matters.”

“Can you give me a hint?” I asked.

“It’s about Smith. It’s old, it’s personal and it will ruin him in the South. That’s all I’m going to say over any phone, secure or not. You’ll need to come out here.”

Out there was rural Connecticut, Litchfield County, where Theowulf lived in a small, squalid home on a wooded lot a few miles from a country store, twenty miles outside the little town of New Hartford. It was a three-hour drive from Logan airport in Boston. I took the red-eye and was there the next morning. I flew home the same night, armed with information that could, as he had promised, kill Smith in the South.

Theowulf was an unsettling man in his oddity and a terrifying man in his capacity and industry. His ill-lit hovel was festooned with code sheets, littered with leaflets and cryptic memes. His servers hummed eerily. Theowulf himself was more troll than man – a limp-limbed, hunch-shouldered, dirty, stained, fiendish creature in a torn tee shirt and sunglasses.

I entered his foul lair but did not sit, nor was I invited to.

“Here it is,” he said, passing me a thick manila envelope.

“I hope this was worth my trip out here,” I said, asserting my authority despite the truth, which was that he summoned me and I came, not the other way around.

“Yeah, whatever,” said Theowulf. “I don’t know if you’ll use it but I know it’s the sort of thing you want me to replace. I found it. You’ll do with it whatever you choose.”

I cut in, “Actually that’s not up to me. This is information for the candidate to make decisions about. I don’t even need to know what’s in here.”

“But you do know,” he said, “and you can either share it with the candidate or not. Do what you like.”

Without another world I turned and left. I was glad to leave him behind.

The next morning I was in the office earlier than usual and I sent Lydia a message asking her to come in. Though she still maintained a deliberate space between us, I decided to talk to her before I took my bombshell from Theowulf higher up the chain. I trusted her opinion. I also needed to share responsibility for what I was about to do. It was a cowardly thing. I had no reason to pull her into the muddy parts of our business. I just didn’t want to be in the mud all alone. She was in the office within a half-hour.

“I need to talk to you,” I said.

“Sure,” she said. “Is everything alright?”

“I think so,” I replied. “In fact, I think things are about to be very alright. But I wanted to talk to you about that before I do what I think I’m about to do. It has to do with my trip yesterday.”

“You were in Boston, right?”

“I was near there. But that’s not important. I might as well have been in a black hole.”

“So why all the hush-hush? Is this something I don’t really want to know?”

“It might be,” I admitted.

“Then why would you feel the need to unburden yourself at my expense?”

“That’s not my intention,” I said. “I’m not trying to drag you into anything. I just want to know, honestly, what you would do if you had information that could badly hurt one of our opponents but isn’t actually relevant to the campaign or the issues.”

“Oh crap,” she said. “You’ve got dirt on someone. It’s Smith, isn’t it?”

“As a matter of fact…”

“No. Don’t tell me,” she said. “Let me just ask you this. Does anything you know make the opponent any less qualified or is it information that indicates he is unsuitable to govern?”

“Not at all. It’s purely salacious.”

“Then why would you even ask me what you should do? You should fucking bury it. You know that.”

“No,” I protested, “I don’t know that. That’s why I want to discuss it.”

“Well that’s too bad,” she said. “I don’t wish to discuss it. I am not going to assuage your guilt about doing something you know we should not do. I believe you went back East to dig up some kind of dirt and now that you’ve got it you don’t want to be the only one who’s dirty.”

“Damn it, Lydia,” I fumed, “we do not have time for your sermonizing. This is not a Girl Scout Jamboree; it’s a presidential race. We’re trying to install a man in the most powerful elected position in the god-damned world and you want to act like it’s a fair and open process. Wake up. Fair and open guys finish last in this game.”

“You already know what you’re going to do. I can’t see why you would ask me anything in the first place. Trying to pull me into your gutter is a selfish thing to do,” she sniped.

That one stung. “I am doing no such thing…”

“Yes you are, and it’s a small, petty cowardly thing to do.”

That stung even worse. “Jesus Christ, woman…”

“Oh don’t pull that on me, the high-handed, there-there-now shit. You have some kind of prurient detail about something someone saw or heard or alleged or overheard or whatever. It’s probably old and probably of no real merit and you’re talking about using it to damage an opponent when our entire campaign up to this point has been about building our candidate up, not tearing the others down. We’ve done a remarkable thing here. You have done a remarkable thing and with the end in sight you’re going to make it something foul, something common. They do things like that. We don’t.”

“You mean you don’t. I do what I have to do to win. I’m proud of everything we’ve done to get this far and the only thing I could be ashamed of in the end is stopping short of what it takes. There’s no award for second or third in a presidential race.”

“Why is self-respect not an award? What honor do you need beyond dignity? How about integrity? How about the knowledge that when tested you did the right thing even though it wasn’t the advantageous thing?”

“You know who talks like that?” I asked.

“Do tell. Who talks thus?”

“Losers,” I said, “and I don’t fucking lose.”

I went to my desk. She sat at the table and pretended to read a report. I shuffled some papers, smugly indignant. After a few minutes she broke the silence.

“I want to make sure you hear what I’m about to tell you,” she said. “Can you please look at me?”

I did so.

“I’m asking you,” she said, “personally and as your colleague. Please don’t do this, whatever it is.”

“You’re not being fair,” I said. “You don’t even know what…”

“No!” she insisted. “You’re not hearing me. I’m asking you. I, Lydia Black, am asking you. I’m asking you not to do this. Please.”

“I’ll take it under advisement,” I said.

“I can’t impress upon you enough how serious I am about this. If you destroy what we’ve worked so hard for, well I don’t know… I’m just trying to be clear with you. I am asking you as earnestly as I can. I have not asked you for anything and I’m only asking this because it’s critical. Please don’t take the tawdry way to an unearned win.”

“I’ll think about it,” I said.

“I’m completely serious,” she repeated.

“I can hear how damned serious you are. Give it a rest. I said I’ll think about it.”

I thought about it for an hour. Then I called Markus.

A year had passed since he told me in our first meeting to contact him directly if I needed anything to do my job. Until that moment I had not taken him up on the offer of access. I had the number of his supposed direct line, but I didn’t bother using it. I went through the channels. It took me ten minutes to reach the Campaign Director.

“I need to speak with him,” I said.

“What about?” he asked.

“It’s for his ears only.”

“Well it’s going to have to wait.”

“Listen,” I told him, “if you put me off and he learns about what I have to tell him too late to do anything with the information, I’ll make sure the last thing I do is let everyone know where the snag came from. If you want to stand between the candidate and the information he needs to make a pivotal decision at a critical moment in the campaign, go right ahead.”

It took another hour, but I received a text with a number and instructions to call immediately. It was Markus.

I began, “Thank you for speaking with me, sir.”

“No need for all that,” he said. “What is it that I need to know?”

“Sir, I need your authorization to do something unorthodox. It’s important, but it’s not something you want to share with anyone. What I really need, sir, is to speak to you in person.”

“Well I’m in Dallas,” he said. “Tomorrow morning I’m off to Austin and from there I’m not sure.”

“I can be in Dallas in six hours,” I said.

“Then I’ll see you here in six hours,” he said. “Come to the suite. They’ll let you in.”

The suite was the penthouse at the Adolphus, a Baroque colossus in its 126th year of service to the high and mighty. I was shown past a platoon of private security by The Soldier.

“This one better be important,” he said as we walked.

“It’s important,” I assured him.

“I hope you’re right. You know I like you and I trust you. But you can’t push your way into see him and then waste his time. If this isn’t what you say it is, something important, you’ll lose access to him. I don’t want that. I need you to have access to him. He needs someone to give him the right facts, not like these over-priced jag-offs he has hanging around sniffing opportunity.”

“I promise,” I told him. “He needs to know this.”

“Then here’s your chance,” he said, pushing open the double doors to an expansive office where Markus sat on a leather couch, talking by speaker phone with a speech writer.”

“I’ve got to go,” he said to the speech writer. “Get that fixed like we discussed. I appreciate it.”

He stood and extended his hand. He was truly a grand man.

“I’m glad you could make it out here,” he said.

“Sir,” I replied, “it’s getting down to the wire. I’m where you tell me to be.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “You’re still your own man, even in a game with stakes this high. I appreciate what you do and I’m grateful you would come all this way. So take a seat. Let’s hear what it is that’s got you so riled up.”

What a truly marvelous specimen was Tom Markus. Gracious almost to a fault. The finest man of his time.

“Well sir,” I began, “I’m sure you know we’re losing here in Texas. In fact, we’ve slipped a bit in Georgia as well. Atlanta is solid but in the white communities Smith is making inroads with the prison thing.”

“That’s such a stupid plan,” he said. “I think people will sniff it out.”

“Yes sir,” I said, “but in the meantime it’s giving him the position of front-runner in at least one state we can’t afford to lose and it’s threatening us in another. Texas is not a state we can risk. Georgia matters too, but Texas is essential.”

“I hear you. But that’s not what you came here to tell me, is it? I know how important Texas is.”

“No sir,” I said, “that’s not it. I came to tell you that I am aware of something that could change the situation in Texas, and maybe elsewhere.” I noticed The Soldier still standing near the door. Looking his way I told Markus, “This is really something I would like only you to hear.”

“I don’t leave,” said The Soldier.

“He’s okay,” Markus insisted. “I assure you, there’s nothing I don’t want him to hear. Even if I heard it alone the first thing I would do is tell him. Speak freely. It’s just the three of us and I want him here.”

“Very well, sir.” I took a deep breath. “Sir, you told me that if there was something I needed to do my job, I should ask you for it.”

“And I meant it,” he said.

“Sir, I need a million dollars.”

“Done,” he said. “Just tell the accountants to allocate it.”

“No sir,” I said. “I need a million dollars that nobody knows about and nobody can track.”

“Oh I see,” he said.

He stood and walked to the window. He looked out on the city below in silence. The room was quiet for a matter of minutes while he struggled visibly with his thoughts, There is no formula for how to deal with variables like those that confronted him in that moment. He rubbed a hand through his hair, staring out at the streets of Dallas, then crossed his arms and closed his eyes. His bearing reflected the seriousness of the situation, a seriousness he could sense without having heard the story at all.

In time he spoke without looking my way. “I don’t mind telling you I knew this time would come. I didn’t expect it to be you who would bring me the news, but I was pretty certain it would happen. It’s not enough to get close. To get over the top you have to step on somebody, don’t you? Well the time has come. I guess this is the test. Will I or won’t I step on someone?”

“Sir,” I said, “Forgive me, but I prefer to think of it as stepping past someone. I’m not asking you to step on anyone, I’m just asking you to let someone get stepped on.”

He turned to face me, his arms still crossed. “You’re parsing words,” he said. “You can afford to play with semantics. I don’t get the same luxury. If I do what you’re asking me to, someone’s going to get stepped on and it will be my doing, one way or another.”

“Yes sir,” I said. “I see your point.”

“I don’t want you tell me any more about what you plan to do,” he said. “I just want to know what this is going to cost me.”

“Like I said, sir, a million dollars.”

“No,” he countered, “I’m not talking about the money. I can afford that. I mean what else it could cost me. Will I sleep well?”

“I can’t promise you that, sir.”

“Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” he mused.

“Sir,” I said, “I can promise you plausible deniability. That’s the best I can promise you. You will know what comes of this but no one will track it to you. It will cripple Smith in Texas, maybe elsewhere. It will help Bradley slightly; it will help you more. It can win the election if I do it right and only I can do it.”

“So it will cost me a million dollars and my own conscience. That’s quite a price. Is it the price of the presidency?”

“I’m afraid so, sir.”

“Can you stay here tonight?” he asked.

“Yes sir I can.”

“I’ll have your money in the morning. I have two conditions.”

“Whatever you say, sir.”

“First,” he said, “it’s a cash exchange and there will be no records. And second,” he pointed at The Soldier, “he goes with you.”

“I understand, sir.”

“Now if you’ll forgive me,” he said, “I have a call to make.”

The Soldier showed me to an adjoining suite.

“You’ll be alone here until the morning,” he said.

I told him, “I want you to know how much I appreciate your hand in all this.”

“Thank me when it’s done,” he said, adding, “Are you ready for this?”

“I am,” I assured him.

“Good. Stay ready,” he coached. “Where are we going?”

“Nashville.”

“Be ready at six. I’ll come for you,” he said. “If you go out tonight, go alone. I don’t want to see anyone near you between now and zero six hundred. That’s twelve hours. Get some rest.”

That night I reached Lydia at the office. It was nearly ten o’clock in San Diego.

“You should go home,” I told her.

“Where are you?” she asked.

“I’m in Dallas.”

“Please say you didn’t do what we talked about today.”

“No,” I proclaimed, “I did not. In fact I came here at his invitation to talk about his speech in Austin tomorrow. The candidate, at least, takes Texas seriously.”

“I take Texas seriously,” she protested. “Did you call to belittle me?”

“Sorry. No, I’m just calling to check in. I’m off to Nashville tomorrow for a quick visit with one of the geeks. I’ll be in San Diego tomorrow night or the next morning.”

“Do what you need to do. I can hold down the fort. It’s all good here anyway.”

“Lydia,” I said, ’thank you for everything.”

“You don’t have to thank me,” she said.

“Please,” I insisted. “Just say ‘you’re welcome.’”

“Alright, you’re welcome. Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” I said. “I’ll see you in a day or so.”

“It’s what, midnight there?” she asked. “You should get some sleep.”

“I will,” I promised. “See you soon.”

The Soldier knocked at five minutes to six. I was dressed and ready.

“You got a bag?” he asked.

“Just what I’m wearing,” I said.

“Let’s go,” he directed, and we were off to the airport where a private jet waited.

It was just under two hours to Nashville.

“I was in Nashville before the Second Gulf War,” said The Soldier.

“Were you in Iraq?” I asked.

“Two years in Iraq, one in Afghanistan.”

“What did you do in the service?” I asked.

“Anything they told me to do. In Iraq, I mostly gave money to rats,” he said. “I counted through stacks of American money and oversaw giving it to enemies willing to tell us about other enemies.”

“Hell of a job, huh?”

“It was a job,” he said. “I didn’t ask questions. Still don’t.”

“As fate would have it,” I said, “we’re on our way to give money to an enemy of our enemy.”

“You just do what you’re going to do,” he said. “But I promise you, if this gets to him in any way, if the stink of this little excursion comes back to him by any means, you’ll have an enemy in me, and that’s not something you want.”

“I understand,” I told him, “and I’m actually relieved you’re with me for this. I don’t know if I could have done it alone.”

“You’re not alone,” he said, “but the two of us, we’re on our own. This one’s just us and that’s the way it’s going to stay.”

He slept. We were in Nashville at ten thirty. We were back in the air by one in the afternoon, the deed done.

In Austin, The Soldier left the jet while I remained aboard. As he left he told me, “This trip didn’t happen… but I’m glad it did. You go home and get back to what it is that you do. This sort of thing isn’t for you.”

“I’ll see you soon,” I said. “I’ll buy you a beer in San Diego.”